AEW Full Gear 2023 was the night Maxwell Jacob Friedman suffered injuries that were the most painful he’s ever experienced.
And that’s coming straight from your AEW American Champion himself.
MJF appeared on episode 100 of the “Casual Conversations with The Classic” podcast for an in-depth interview, during which he spoke about his match against “Switchblade” Jay White at AEW Full Gear 2023 resulting in the most painful injuries he’s ever suffered in his career, and how the fans didn’t seem to care.
“So in the Jay White match, I hit an elbow drop from the top rope to the floor because I was trying to impress people that I thought cared about me,” he said. “Later on, I found out they didn’t. My hip popped out its socket. Because I thought those people cared about me, I fought through it for I think another 20 minutes, maybe, and then not long after that, Jay White, who is a hell of a professional wrestler, I beat him, but that’s neither here nor there, he’s a hell of a professional wrestler, he hit me with a Urinagi off the top rope, and I landed directly on my left shoulder, and my labrum just snapped entirely in half. So the left part of my body was just thrashed.”
Friedman continued, “Then when I got to the back, I was just crying. I’ve literally not cried like that in my entire life. I was just bawling my fucking eyes out because the adrenaline dump wore off. It was the most pain I’d ever been in in my entire life. Then somebody tells me you need to do a press conference and I go, ‘Oh, I love the wrestling fans. I’ll do a press conference, and I’ll fight through these tears.’ Once again, wrestling fans showed me they don’t care about me. They made memes about it, they thought it was funny. Hands down, the most pain I’ve ever been in, and nobody cared.”
(H/T to Fightful.com for transcribing the above quotes.)
